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Need Facebook Like/Share advice for an idea..

I'm working on a link building campaign to promote a software product which has a website in urgent need of exposure so I'm doing the traditional SEO work but also have an idea relating to social media, Facebook to be precise.

I have another software product for the mobile market with a high number of users who I know for certain are all facebook users so I'm thinking of using this to my advantage by requesting to the users of the 'free' version of the product that they can obtain the 'paid' version for free by either liking or sharing the website I want to help promote in order to generate more links back.

I'm just trying to decide if this is going to be worth it, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing the recent MOZ report saying that Facebook likes or shares now have a stronger influence than twitter or traditional links back to a site.

So if anyone could advise me a little further here I would greatly appreciate it, Are 'likes' sufficient, or would users need to 'share' a link to the page I want to promote, and I'm assuming that they should refer directly to the website in question and not a Facebook fan page.

Looking forward to hearing from you, I'm really hoping I might be onto a good idea...

Well the page I applied the test to has currently had > 2200 FB shares.

Hard to tell if its had any positive effect ranking wise, but I don't think so. I think the ranking boosts I've gained over the past month is purely from my on-page seo and content additions.

So for now I think facebook is really only good for reaching a broader audience in the hope people on facebook will visit the page and go from there. I don't see much if any influence on rankings from purely having people your share or like page.

Thanks for your prompt reply David. It's unfortunate to read that there wasn't any noticeable impact. I'm getting ready to launch my social commerce site in a month or so and I was leaning more towards FB like as they are the easiest from a user standpoint. But from what I read in SEOmoz FB shares carry a higher weight for SEO.

Well so far so good, I set my plan in motion yesterday afternoon and have had a few shares/likes referencing my site. So like most things SEO, only time will tell how effective this will be. I'm hoping to try and obtain a steady 10-20 a day, is it enough? I've no idea, it seems a very gray area at the moment.

I'd like to be able to better monitor this tactic too, will it affect googles pagerank, or the moztrust/mozrank figures? And will I even see these references to my site appear through linkscape/opensiteexplorer? Again I've no idea at the moment but it sounds like a good experiment and after a month hopefully I'll be able to come back here and tell you all YES its effective or NO its been a waste of time.

Facebook shares are pretty powerful, focus on those and not likes. You want them to post a link directly to your website and not your Facebook page. This has a high correlation with rankings, so getting all those shares can be a very effective SEO tactic for you. Is it worth it? Depends how much a paid user would normally spend. If it is pretty minimal then sure, go for it. But if each user normally pays quite a bit and they are expensive to add for you, then you may want to say "first 100 people to share us on facebook get paid version free" or something like that. Get the shares but minimize the damage.

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